Business is good in Poland for priests who are skilled in the arts of demonic extrication. The country is in the midst of an exorcism epidemic (or boom, depending on how you feel about it.) And this has inspired Catholic priests to join forces with a publisher, and launch the world's first monthly magazine devoted to the subject. And with a three-month waiting list for exorcisms in Warsaw, people had better start reading.

Called Egzorcysta Magazine, the monthly journal contains such page-turning titles as, "New Age - the spiritual vacuum cleaner," and "Satan is real." The first issue is 62 pages and costs about $3.00.

"The rise in the number or exorcists from four to more than 120 over the course of 15 years in Poland is telling," Father Aleksander Posacki, a professor of philosophy, theology and leading demonologist and exorcist told reporters in Warsaw at the Monday launch of the Egzorcysta monthly.

Ironically, he attributed the rise in demonic possessions in what remains one of Europe's most devoutly Catholic nations partly to the switch from atheist communism to free market capitalism in 1989.

"It's indirectly due to changes in the system: capitalism creates more opportunities to do business in the area of occultism. Fortune telling has even been categorised as employment for taxation," Posacki told AFP.

"If people can make money out of it, naturally it grows and its spiritual harm grows too," he said, hastening to add authentic exorcism is absolutely free of charge.

Ah, so it's authentic exorcism that's free of charge. Good to know; now we can avoid all those inauthentic kinds.